When you hear Digilaw, you think about one of the foremost legaltech platforms that became popular for its online learning model. They took digital learning to a new level. Digilaw started actively around early 2019 as an online class for lawyers, majorly through Whatsapp groups. Lawyers and non-lawyers specialized in areas of technology law and emerging technologies were brought onboard to teach other lawyers who were interested in certain areas. Before classes were organised, the founders carried out a survey to find out what the students wanted to learn at the time and found it surprising that more often than not, the students indicated interests in non-legal and tech-focused like software coding, blockchain, cryptocurrency. That’s where the journey began.

Pre-Covid Era…

Before the pandemic, classes moved from Whatsapp groups to zoom, and to other platforms that could host the content after the live classes for those who could not participate in the live classes. Towards the end of 2019, the startup encountered issues and could not keep up with the demand for classes at that point, hence, a decline in the delivery of classes. They went into hibernation in operations, but maintained activity on their social media accounts.

Then the pandemic hit…

I was already in law school when the pandemic hit and we had to go home, and online classes began. Even the law school had to adapt to online classes, though that came with its challenges, especially that of data consumption. Like one class could consume about 200 to 250mb and that was for Monday to Friday, says Akin, one of the co-founders of Digilaw.

A tweet changed the narrative…

Scrolling through the streets of Twitter, Akin saw a tweet from a friend stating that she wished there was a podcast where they could discuss things related to what was being taught in law school and boom that’s when the idea hit, that Digilaw could actually do that. ”I reached out to my partner and she got on board with implementing the idea. We contacted other colleagues who got onboard and two weeks later, we launched”, Akin Agunbiade, one of the founders said.

Getting good reviews on the podcast gave the team the right validation that they were actually onto something and solving a problem, especially for law school students. Listening to the podcast was more convenient and less data consuming (the perfect starter pack for a student). It got a lot more interesting as they also brought in practicing lawyers to talk to topics around Criminal Litigation and Corporate Law Practice on the podcast.

Nine months later, with 50 episodes, 4700 downloads and a sponsor, Digilaw seems to have hacked a different and cheaper way of accessing legal content especially for law students and lawyers alike; legal content simplified on podcasts.

With the level of reception that the content got, Akin decided to start doing a lot more research into podcasting as a business and how it could be used to further the dissemination of legal information as well as creating a platform for aggregating other podcasts. With this model, all that a podcast producer needs to do is create their content while Digilaw handles every other thing, including the design, promotion and hosting of the podcast.

The co-founder journey…

Akin and his co-founder, Keyukemi Ubi were classmates and only started talking to each other after school, in 2019. Keyu was open to the idea from the very beginning and that’s how she got onboard, and since then she has been very valuable to the team. Akin says there is no way he could have learned podcasting without Keyu. In addition to handling the Operations in Digilaw, Keyu is enrolled in the Nigerian University of Technology Management while Akin is focused on the technical side of the podcast and works with Tech Hive Advisory.

Future plans for Digilaw and podcasting…

”The plan is to really explore the business of podcasting. Digilaw has not pivoted from online learning but we are now delivering it differently and making it a lot more open to everyone. . We are taking the knowledge of Nigerian laws across the Atlantic to people who are interested in knowing about our laws. Let’s call it legal knowledge without borders. We intend to work on exploring partnerships and creating platforms that will help Nigerian podcast producers produce, host and monetize their podcast with no hassles”, says Akin.

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